Summary:
Also listed in Veined category. Features include 1) small size, 2) a dry, white, tough cap, 3) adnate, distant, white gills that are fold-like in larger caps, 4) a dry, white, minutely downy stem, 5) growth on Carex or Scirpus, and 6) elongate spores. The description is derived from Redhead(8).

Cap:
0.2-0.75cm across, pulvinate [cushion-shaped] becoming convex and sometimes slightly depressed on disc, tough and membranous, margin incurved when young, revolute [curled up] when old; pure white; dry, opaque, radially furrowed and wrinkled when old, slightly micaceous [with shiny particles] under low magnification

Gills:
adnate, distant, moderately sized, fold-like to vein-like in larger caps, small subgills and anastomoses forming a submerulioid to poroid surface with a few dominant gills; white

Stem:
0.15-0.3cm x 0.01-0.2cm, equal but often slightly swollen at base, solid, often off-center; white; dry, minutely pubescent [downy]; "appearing nearly insititious to the naked eye, actually erumpent from vaguely defined sclerotiumlike subepidermal base with a vestigial pad at the point of emergence"

Odor:
not distinctive

Taste:
not distinctive

Microscopic spores:
spores 13.2-16.0 x 5-6.4 microns, inequilateral, narrowly oboval to elliptic or fusiform, smooth, inamyloid, colorless, often with 1 to 2 droplets, with prominent blunt apiculus; basidia 4-spored, 32.5-38 x 7.5-9.5 microns, elongate-clavate, with clamp connection; cheilocystidia "abundant to widely scattered, prominently projecting", 42-57 x 7-9 microns, colorless, "narrowly ventricose to pedicellate-fusoid or tapering upward from the base, obtuse to subacute, with thin usually pronounced walls"; cap cuticle "a monolayer palisade of mammilate clavate to subglobose or rarely ventricose cells 9-17.5 microns in diameter", with smooth colorless walls that are "thickened apically, agglutinated by a thin gelatinous matrix, and interspersed with pileocystidia"; pileocystidia "abundant, prominently projecting, narrowly ventricose, or tapering upward from the base, obtuse to subacute", thin-walled to moderately thick-walled, colorless, 33-42.5 microns; cap trama hyphae generally noninflated, 3.5-5.5 microns wide, loosely interwoven except near hymenium, with clamp connections, thin-walled, smooth, colorless, inamyloid; lamellar hyphae similar to cap trama hyphae but more densely compacted

Spore deposit:
white

Notes:
Collections were examined from BC, MB, NT, ON, MI, Finland, Germany, and the United Kingdom, (Redhead).

EDIBILITY

Synonyms and Alternate Names:
Gloiocephala caricis (P. Karst.) Bas